Wow, it’s been 14 days. We arrived in Tahiti, which completed the first phase of the world cruise. Some people only signed on for this much, so they departed and about 30 new folks started their cruise here. Yikes, that would have been a long flight…
Yesterday we were in Moorea, the sister island of Tahiti. It’s pronounced “more-RAY-ah”, but I always think of Moria from Lord of the Rings. Moorea is stunningly beautiful. You grow a bit spoiled hopping from one amazing tropical island to another, but this stood out. I’m told its only competition is Bora Bora, and we arrive there tomorrow. I’ll get back to you.
Perversely it was at Moorea where I had my first bad experience of the cruise, but it certainly was not Silversea’s fault. I signed up for a dolphin tour. Turns out Dr. Michael Poole has been studying dolphins here for over 30 years at a University of California facility, so we had about 20 of us with him on a covered boat. He said he had about a 95% success rate with finding the dolphins – guess who had lucky 5%? I still enjoyed the trip, and learned a bunch about dolphins. But I do not have any cool “Flipper” pictures for you.
At Tahiti Silversea sponsored a “Meet the Tiki Gods” event for the guests who were taking the full 132-day world cruise. Five buses drove 20 minutes to the Tahiti Museum where we were fed and entertained.
Those are some tall head pieces. We were outside, but it fortunate we were under this semi-permanent tent, as we had a good 30 minute down pour in the middle of lunch. Breadfruit is an island staple, but I did not know you could make “potato chips” out of it. I lived in Hawaii as a kid, and while here I discovered how much I missed some of the fruit, like papaya.
(Technical note: It takes me an hour to upload each crappy 100 KB picture. And that’s not a slow uplink, that’s having the “post image” fail every 2 minutes, and pushing the button again. I hope to replace all these images with some higher resolution stuff once we get to Sydney.)